Colin Ross, "Unser Amerika", Chapter 15

 15.

The Slave Trade of White People

"For sale a boy who has five years and three months to serve. He has learned tailoring and works well."

This advertisement was in the Pennsylvanian Staatsboten on December 14, 1773. Another time in the same newspaper it says: "For sale of a maid's service. She is a strong, fresh and healthy person. Still has five years to stand."

Those thus tendered like a piece of cattle were not black Negro slaves, but white people, Germans who had come to America to find the land of freedom.

The white man trade is a dismal period in American history, even sadder than the black trade. It is so inconsistent with the claimed glory of the land of liberty, human rights, and self-determination that people like to quickly turn over this page of the national history book, if not suppress it altogether. As a result, surprisingly few people know that from the beginning there were not only black slaves in the New World, but white slaves as well.

Of course, they were not called that, and the form of their servitude was a little different. But basically it came down to the same thing. White people were bought and sold like slaves. Families were arbitrarily torn apart, husband and wife, parents and children were sold to different masters in sometimes far away cities or even states, so that the individual family members often did not see each other again for many years or not at all. They were at the mercy of their lord and master without resistance. He could demand any work from them, exploit or abuse them in any way until their strength was completely exhausted. If he felt like it, he could whip them like a black slave, whether it was a man or a woman, a boy or a tender girl. So abundant must have been the use of the whip by the owners of these white slaves that a law had to be enacted according to which each individual offense could be punished with no more than ten lashes.

White slaves had a great advantage over black ones - they were cheaper. Negroes were expensive. It was costly and not without danger to trade for them on the distant Guinea coast or to capture them and transport them across the wide Atlantic. Thus, many a planter who would have liked to have a few Negroes had to do without them. But why black slaves when you could have white ones?

Why sail to distant Africa to catch slaves when it was so much easier and less dangerous to do so at home? Former slave traders came up with the glorious idea of buying poor people's children from them and trading them on as laborers in the New World. Or they simply caught them on the streets of London. Sometimes it was adults who were kidnapped in this way. Kidnapping has a very inglorious past.

In addition to the young people who were picked up in this way, robbed or taken from their parents for a sandwich, criminals and convicts were also sent "as work slaves" to the New World. or a judge was found who thought he was acting in a particularly humane way when he sent the thief of a pair of shoes or a loaf of bread not to the penitentiary but to the colonies for several years of forced labor.

By its very nature, white slavery was temporary. No one was sold into servitude for his entire life, but only for a certain number of years. However, since each indentured servant could be sold on at will, and since no contracts were drawn up or books kept on the purchase and sale, it was entirely at the discretion of the respective owners how long they withheld freedom from their white slaves. Many, perhaps most, were freed after the legal period had expired. But uncounted perished miserably in uninterrupted servitude.

The system of white slavery for a set amount of time spread over to Germans at the moment when a strong emigration to the New World began. In fact, a special form of white slavery developed, that of the redemptionists. These were emigrants who sold themselves into servitude for a certain number of years - usually seven - in order to pay for their passage. The conditions in America at that time, compared to today, were just the opposite. Labor was in high demand, and they couldn't get enough of it. So this trade in white human flesh turned out to be an excellent business. The shipowners and captains earned incomparably more from the redemptionists than from the paying passengers. Therefore, they tried to make redemptionists out of them in every way. Every fraud and every scam was justified for this purpose. One popular means was to trick the travelers with money in the Dutch ports under all kinds of pretenses until the hyenas and land shark innkeepers had taken the last penny from them, so that they had to submit to the conditions of the white slave traders and sign every contract presented to them.

What was waiting for them on the other side was something that very few people realized. Already the crossing, which lasted many weeks or even months at that time, was horrible beyond all description. The Redemptionists were transported worse than black slaves, because they were not so valuable. In one ship, the "April" of Captain de Grod, which had room for four hundred people, they crammed one thousand two hundred. Of these, one hundred and fifteen died in the port of Amsterdam. Of the four hundred passengers on another ship, no more than fifty arrived alive in the port of Philadelphia.

The shipowners did not suffer any loss from these deaths, unlike in the case of the black slave cargoes; because for the participants of such a voyage the rule applied: along with the catch, along with the hang! (in for a penny, in for a pound). The survivors had to take over the working hours for the deceased in the port of arrival, not only children for their parents, sisters for their brothers, but also individuals for complete strangers, simply because they were their fellow passengers. This was not against the law, but was completely lawful. In 1762, fifty passengers on a Dutch ship were imprisoned in Philadelphia until they agreed to share the service of more than a hundred fellow passengers who had died of hunger and colic during the crossing. This system had the great advantage that the old and sick, who would have been difficult to get rid of in any case, died en route, and the young and strong were charged double or triple the service time in return, making them much more valuable and raising their price far higher.

It was Germans who first opposed this outrageous white trafficking. In Philadelphia, in 1764, the first of these "German Societies" was founded, which later spread throughout the United States. Their goal was the abolition of the white slave trade and humane treatment of emigrants on ships and in ports. 

Admittedly, this goal was not to be achieved until later. The Declaration of Independence did not bring freedom to white slaves any more than it did to black slaves. With the Declaration of the Rights of Man and the proclamation of the equal right of all men to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness, it was found quite compatible to continue to buy and sell whites as well as blacks, and to put a price on their recapture if they attempted to escape bondage by flight. As late as April 1817 - almost half a century after the Declaration of Independence - a prize of $50 was offered in the "Baltimore American" for the capture of Moritz Schuhmacher, thirty years old, described as follows: "He is a good teacher, understands French and Latin; an excellent workman; speaks English imperfectly." As late as 1818, the German Müller family of Langensulzbach was sold as slaves in Neuorleans, and one of Müller's daughters was not able to regain freedom until 1845, following a lengthy, sensational trial, based on a ruling by the Louisiana Supreme Court.

Even today, this system has not been completely eradicated. It lives on in individual Southern states in the system of peonage, which keeps black as well as white people in debt bondage for years and threatens runaway debtors with the whip, not unlike that Moritz Schuhmacher, whom all his Latin and French would not have saved him from if recaptured. In the same year in which I am writing these lines, a few youths were not only sentenced to long prison terms for robbery, but were also tied half-naked to stakes and publicly whipped in twenty-degree cold. The pictures of the whip mangling their bare backs were published in the major daily newspapers without a cry of dissent. Even today, America is the land of the freedom struggle and the land of the slaveholders rolled into one.